In this Research Note, we examine Kterio, the US, UK and Netherlands-based building intelligence SaaS company. This analysis covers their stakeholders, funding, vertical markets and partnerships. This article is part of a series covering the activities of startups such as Haltian, Nuuka Solutions, Spica Technologies and Flowscape.

Founded in 2020 as MarketBridge-ISS (MBISS), the company offers solutions to manage, analyze and optimize any size commercial real estate portfolio via a single common platform and 24/7 service centres. In 2022, MBISS changed its name to Kterio to better convey the breadth of its solutions and market impact.  The company rebranding came with a significant change in operations, said Chief Operations officer, Mark Glynn in February 2022. There have been improvements, such as an increase in sales and profits through the implementation of new management strategies and they are already on track for 30% projected growth this year. The company reports 25 employees on LinkedIn.

Kterio provides a proprietary Building Digital Operating System (B-DOS) platform that allows building owners and managers to digitally manage commercial and industrial building assets, reducing operating costs and supporting ESG initiatives. The Kterio BDOS platform aggregates data from disparate closed building systems such as HVAC, lighting, utility metering and elevators/lifts and unifies them into a single platform. Building owners can use the platform to monitor their buildings’ assets in real-time, benchmark the performance of various systems, identify operations and maintenance issues, and manage and optimize physical assets in their building portfolios efficiently while also complying with ESG initiatives. The solution enhances the work of the building management staff and helps to make decisions that significantly reduce energy consumption.

The company claims its technology is disruptive to the market because it requires no upfront capital investment nor building retrofitting. Rather, they use analytics to capture and analyze the 1000s of data points currently being produced every second by all the devices in a building. They can identify alarms, energy waste, and preventive maintenance opportunities and either fix the problem remotely or quickly alert local engineers on how to address it.

On 30^th August 2022, Kterio announced that it had largely completed $10m of funding, with PropTech venture capital firm, Round Hill Ventures as the lead investor, and real estate investment management firm, Brighton Ventures. The investment will fund the scale-out of Kterio’s Real Estate SaaS business in Europe and North America.

Kterio has experienced growth through partnerships with global real estate management firms, such as Colliers, JIT Energy Services and TClarke. In May 2022, the firm announced a new partnership with HumbleBuildings – a major building surveying and management firm in the Netherlands. HumbleBuildings focus on a wide variety of buildings, from small residential complexes to large commercial towers.

Kterio serves customers in the commercial building, industrial, multi-family and hospital sectors. In the US healthcare sector, the firm has partnered with Nashville, Tennessee-based Intuitive MB (Intuitive Medical Buildings) to launch a smart hospital platform powered by Kterio software.  The release of its medical building operating system, which uses the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning technologies to create "smart" hospitals and medical office buildings, was announced in March 2022.

Based on software developed in Europe and currently used in commercial real estate and healthcare organizations across multiple countries, the system allows any medical building – old or new – to become "Smart Ready" in approximately four weeks, creating significant energy and maintenance savings of approximately 20-30% annually. 

Kterio launched its Smart Service Center in Warrington UK in November 2021. The 3,000 sq. ft. engineering center is capable of monitoring the energy consumption, equipment alarms, and ESG impact for over 1,000 commercial buildings worldwide. Over the next two years, Kterio expects to expand the operation to over 50 employees who can provide real-time monitoring and engineering expertise to support the company’s SaaS smart building platform.

Memoori Take on Kterio:  The combination of their cloud-based smart building analytics platform and a global Smart Service Center providing real-time monitoring and engineering expertise differentiates Kterio from many other real estate SaaS startups. 

This article was written by Daphne Tomlinson, Senior Research Associate at Memoori.